OT: New Computer Build, Wow

[Mike Martin]

Those of you that know me well know that I've been living a crazy life the last few years. I live in Chicago but work in NJ where I rent a room because I'm here so much. Over the years I've brought a good bit of my music gear out here for my "home away from home" studio. A few years ago, on an extreme budget and using leftover parts and pieces I put together a desktop computer that I've used on and off for music...when I have time.

 

So recently my father called and told me that he wanted a new computer. While there is nothing wrong with his current computer, I think there must be some kind of competition with his other retired neighbors about who has the coolest or fastest gadget. His current computer is identical to the one I have at home in Chicago...after I built that one, he wanted one just like it so I built one for him. Having the same computer solves a lot of problems as I'm his personal geek squad.

 

So as very early Christmas present he offered to buy everything, one for him and one for me. Build the "go fast" machine he asked. I spec'd it out and he bought it. All the pieces arrived early this week and last night I finished them both.

 

So the world of SSD drives and lots of RAM may be old news to some of you here but holy $hit is this thing fast. i7 4770K, 16gigs of RAM and 256gig SSD, along with some "normal" SATA drives for big storage and the whole thing is whisper quiet. I have only just started installing Cubase and my other software so I'll have to report back soon on overall DAW performance. The only big puzzle as I install all of this is handling which things go on the SSD and which items go on the other drives and getting all of that to work. Sounds simple in theory but I guess I'll learn as I go.

 

When I'm done, there aren't any more excuses. My plan is record an album of my ambient / electronica stuff I like to do. I'm writing it here so you guys will hold me to my word and maybe by this time next year it will be done. Wish me luck.

 

 

 

 

[carter_]

Congrats on the new machine and good luck with the record.

 

Would like to hear it when you're done!

[Tonysounds]

That's Awesome!! Look forward to hearing the music, especially based on your Casio programming and demos!

 

[ITGITC]

 

The only big puzzle as I install all of this is handling which things go on the SSD and which items go on the other drives and getting all of that to work. Sounds simple in theory but I guess I'll learn as I go.

 

Mike:

 

I've got Windows 8.1 and my apps on the C drive, (Intel 520, 240 GB).

 

My F drive is dedicated to Steam and all games. It's a Samsung 840 Pro, 512 GB.

 

I install MP3 files, photos, documents, videos, etc. on my D drive, (Western Digital Black, 2 TB).

 

I back up to a number of external drives (USB 3). I keep one on top of the computer. The others are stored off-site.

 

If I were you, I would store large samples and Cubase projects on the hard drive because it is much less expensive, although slower compared to the SSD.

 

I tried this with Steam and games, but later moved those files to a dedicated SSD for the decrease in load times.

 

Good luck!

 

Tom

 

[Theo Verelst]

I was slightly luckier with a machine build I could do for someone (and use it myself too), I went in the "go extreme" corner, and must say I of course felt some nerves having a few thousand worth of parts trickling in the mail, to have to become the "supercomputer" machine I thought was just about the max (unless budget would be multi fold more).

 

Those 4th generation I7s are nice, some are going to be "the new fast" and most are energy safe (and therefore less cooling dependent), memory interfaces are getting faster, and I suppose there possibly is some internal optimization. Of course with a well chosen SSD (think about the long term with these things, too, some have fast specs, but most will err in longer run on hard access patterns) it supercool to boot your whole windows machine in a few seconds! The memory and clock speed of the I7 you mentioned are pretty good, most machines cannot go that fast unless they are overclocked. My I7 extreme is a second generation, has 4 instead of 2 memory banks, which in official ("unleashed", Intel XMP specified) overclock overclock mode are faster than those 4th gen I7, namely 2100GHz instead of 1600 (or 1300), and allows a continuous CPU clock of 4.5 GHz. Half a year ago or so, there were no extreme I7 4th gen. yet, because that would make my LG2011 socket X79 mobo again among the absolute fastest again, but it probably would cost more than most whole systems do. Many cores is also a big improvements if you come from CoreDuo or something: even the first 4 core / 8 thread I7s compute faster than everything else!

 

As I've indicated: if you use those fast CPUs for serious number crunching, cooling will be of the essence, I've used Zahlman for a huge multi-heatpipe dual fan cooler, which isn't loud, yet can dissipate 300 Watts, and a big enclosure with side-airvents a huge top fan, etc. When using these fast machines for what they're worth: they may well turn hot after half an hour (of half a day...) of video processing, unless of course the EUFI/BIOS/Windows keeps a lid on the actual CPU clock speeds. But for using the "peak" power you see when browsing and so on for a long mix-down or picture-conversion-script or other stuff that lasts a while, dissipation will be an important issue to either slow things down, or get enough cooling to keep that fast speed.

 

Did you put in a nice graphics card? For me that was a good test when I had the satisfaction of booting the machine in Windows 8 Pro/64 or Fedora 18/64 bit Linux to test the speed in practice: running heavy graphics demos! Great fun. I didn't use my official Steinberg package recently, because I went Linux, which interests me more, but sure it should be fun to record some interesting plugins and effects with Cubase or newer packages.

 

Theo

[Mike Martin]

The only big puzzle as I install all of this is handling which things go on the SSD and which items go on the other drives and getting all of that to work. Sounds simple in theory but I guess I'll learn as I go.

 

Mike:

 

I've got Windows 8.1 and my apps on the C drive, (Intel 520, 240 GB).

 

My F drive is dedicated to Steam and all games. It's a Samsung 840 Pro, 512 GB.

 

I install MP3 files, photos, documents, videos, etc. on my D drive, (Western Digital Black, 2 TB).

 

I back up to a number of external drives (USB 3). I keep one on top of the computer. The others are stored off-site.

 

If I were you, I would store large samples and Cubase projects on the hard drive because it is much less expensive, although slower compared to the SSD.

 

I tried this with Steam and games, but later moved those files to a dedicated SSD for the decrease in load times.

 

Good luck!

 

Tom

 

Thanks for the advice Tom. That is essentially my plan. I've got a big TB D drive, and a smaller drive which I'll probably be tempted to put a few games on. They can certainly suck time away which should be put towards more important things like music but they're great for an escape from the real world from time to time.

 

Theo, it has a nice graphics card too. Geforce GTX-660. None of the fans including the graphics card make any sound at idle. I haven't tried to push the graphics yet.

[DulceLabs.com]

I've been wondering why you were so quiet this week.

 

Looking forward to hearing more of your music.

[Doerfler]

When I'm done, there aren't any more excuses. My plan is record an album of my ambient / electronica stuff I like to do. I'm writing it here so you guys will hold me to my word and maybe by this time next year it will be done. Wish me luck.

 

Best to you Mike!

[Joe Muscara]

When I'm done, there aren't any more excuses. My plan is record an album of my ambient / electronica stuff I like to do. I'm writing it here so you guys will hold me to my word and maybe by this time next year it will be done. Wish me luck.

Best of luck, Mike. I see I'm not the only one looking forward to this.

 

[i need to work on my own material myself, but I'm not silly enough to tell everyone on KC so they will hold me to it...]

 

As far as SSD drives, they're great. I've updated the internal on my 2009 MacBook Pro and the performance boost was night and day. Recently, I used the old internal HDD to test Mavericks before doing the 'permanent' install on the internal, and I couldn't believe how slow that old drive was. Also, I used to get a lot of messages from apps like GarageBand complaining about disk speed, but those stopped with the SSD.

[Theo Verelst]

Fanless ! Cool, my server that I've run for years I wanted that for, but essentially the 1s gen I7 is pretty hard to get all fanless: a little work going on and you'd need a LP sized fanless cooler.. Hopefully you got a nice fanless supply unit, too.

[Moon Zero Two]

I hate computers. Wait my day day is computer programming. I hate myself.

 

Good luck Mike.

[ITGITC]

Thanks for the advice Tom. That is essentially my plan. I've got a big TB D drive, and a smaller drive which I'll probably be tempted to put a few games on. They can certainly suck time away which should be put towards more important things like music but they're great for an escape from the real world from time to time.

 

Mike, you are most certainly welcome.

 

I enjoy playing video games on my home-built PC as they are a good way to test the build and benchmark performance.

 

After working all day, I'm often too tired or keyed-up to put time into serious piano/keyboard practice.

 

To relax, it helps to fire up a first-person-shooter and kill some aliens.

 

[Theo Verelst]

I don't know how it is with the various windows versions, but my recently bought OEM Windows-8 shows a nice bandwidth graph when writing to disk. Using a very cheap Toshiba external usb-3 (the "blue" USB connector type) drive can almost keep up with my main 130+ MByte/s Western Digital Green Caviar 3GB drive, so that's great for backup. Those drives are recommendable, they're cheap, I use them already for years, in one case 24/7, and thus far prove reliable, and they're reasonably silent and very low power.

 

To test a new system, you may have noticed "memory test" with a Linux install: if your heatsinks are good (maybe keep track of the various temperatures) you could run it to see how well you motherboard functions, and that your memory banks are reliable. My major fast, thus far reliable Asus mobo gave these results:

 

http://www.theover.org/Keybdmg/220620131050sc.jpg

 

Also, the airflow in the machine may be important if you're running fanless, maybe have a more decent sized enclosure, and possibly have a fanless-operation supply, or the supply in the "new" place, at the bottom: airflow makes a lot of cooling difference I know from experience with my server. And airflow creates dust sediments, which again ruin cooling. Today i dusted the machine I built about 1/2 year ago, and that was needed, even though it isn't in a particular dust spot, and I cover it when off:

 

http://www.theover.org/Keybdmg/newmach_mlbsc1.jpg

 

I also took the effort of placing the case-fans on rubber, and indeed there's less contact-noise from the fans, so the main sound is only (major) air flow.

 

Doing all the homework pays off:

 

http://www.theover.org/Keybdmg/premiere5s.jpg

 

running Adobe Premier Pro and After Effects (trial from the "creative cloud"..) works well, zero errors, never ever a bluescreen, hardly ever a stable software crash, and.. blazing speeds enough: running effects over and encoding about 10 minutes low bandwidth 1080 bluray goes in about real-time. A Sony cam can encode even better, and stabilize using about 2 Watts in realtime, but anyhow, modern computers aren't yet very energy-safe! Oh, the actual clock speed according to the official Asus tools is 4.5 Ghz (except for turbo), which is overclocked.

 

T.

 

[Stormfront]

Mike,

 

Will your dad adopt me?

 

Pete

 

[Markyboard]

That's cool Mike! I've built 4 pcs over the last 5 years. One was a rebuild scavenging parts (I7 and ASUS P6T MB) from my original music pc. I gave this to my daughter and it is a killer system for her needs. This summer she complained about her pc shutting off intermittently. Having the ability to swap components from another pc I determined the power supply was bad and replaced that for about a $140.00 Just this morning I was working on my wife's pc which had no display as of a week ago. Again, was able to borrow my daughters vga card not knowing if it was that, the pwr sup, or the MB. Turned out to be the VGA and have ordered a new one for $70.00 (my wife is not a gamer).

 

When you're providing PCs for the whole family home built is the way to go. Of course my family pays a premium for Marky-care.

[Mike Martin]

It's not fanless, however it is whisper quiet. I took ITGITC's advice and did put one game on it to try and stress it. The fans didn't even speed up and the game was running 150fps at max detail. I've spent a couple evenings just installing all my plug-ins and instruments but haven't run any of them yet. The music fun should begin next week.

 

Yes the home computer build benefits the rest of the family, as I upgrade my previous one or components of move their way down to my son or my wife's computer.

[Jim Alfredson]

I recently installed a new CPU fan in my DAW. I bought a second-hand CPU on craigslist for my now obsolete motherboard, the fastest CPU it supports. I wanted to get it up and running so I bought some cheap fan at Best Buy. Man, that thing was noisy. I finally bought a Noctua with two fans. I cannot hear it. And it keeps the CPU cooler than the other, noisier fan. Amazing stuff. That combined with my Seasonic PSU, which is also whisper quiet, means I hear my harddrives spinning and reading/writing over the actual computer, even at full load.

[Markyboard]

Noctua and Seasonic all the way. If my graphics issue turned out to be the pwr supply I would have replaced the Zalman with a Seasonic and made it 3 for 3 in my household.

[Theo Verelst]

The Seasonics were among the first fanless (some types) supplies. In this time of certifications of power efficiency, there's a new fan-less brew, in Europe it's called "Golden King", if forgot the U.S. brand name, it is somewhat known (I could look it up). These have platinum+ certification because they under most load circumstances will only lose less than 8 percent of the power coming to the input terminals, during the switching conversion to the mobo voltages. An added advantage of these very efficient supplies (starting a little over $100 if you look for them) is that they allow mainly fanless operation. There is a fan, but it normally never needs to go on at all, and will only do so when the supply gets hotter than 70 degrees C. I have a 450/550W for my I7-950 server, with nice modular cables, and for the machine I refered to above I got a ~ 120 euro (when imported from Germany to Holland) 600 Watt one which has a switch you can turn on the fan with, but I have it in "only when needed" mode in the bottom of the enclosure.

 

For needed fan's the Zahlmans I have are ok and quiet, but not the way I'd prefer: they make some additional noises that are annoying, and hum a bit, too. That can depend on putting of the RPM control. And case fans can be damped, but CPU fans still for my size aren't completely a whisper without damping the sounds around the enclosure. The Zahlman(s) thus far were reliable, and they're well designed, like cooling the mobo and memory modules as well. But the most quiet fans have golf-ball patterns on the fan-blades, they're called Sharkoon: the 24/7 server has one right where the CD and DVD player used to be, and on DC not too high RPM, you can actually not hear it a few meters away.

 

In the above machine I on purpose put a Asus, heatpipe, dual high quality fan graphics card (A very potent GTX770, except that it is too new for Adobe: it's stuck with support for high end 600 series NVidia cards with Cuda), with quality capacitors and well working (quiet) fan control. That's because I had another brand fanless card that simply burnt out after 1 1/2 year of being continuously on, probably the capacitors failed. The Asus mobos have good attention for supply design (efficiency, fanless southport) and have been reliable with me.

 

But hey, if you're going to use power, like hard gaming and video stuff, you're going to need major cooling, and that's never quiet. The latest I7s are a good way though, more efficient. But a heavy gaming/processing machine can pull at least hundreds of Watts (mine draw about 250W and 400W under heavy load) when they aren't controlled down under load: that heat has go to go somewhere! Funny detail is both I7 machines draw about 90 watts when not loaded, because those Golden Kings promise and deliver high efficiency, also with low loading.

 

T

 

[ITGITC]

 

Noctua and Seasonic all the way. If my graphics issue turned out to be the pwr supply I would have replaced the Zalman with a Seasonic and made it 3 for 3 in my household.

 

This last build, I installed 16GB of Crucial Ballistix RAM. Its heat spreaders are tall. I wanted a replacement for the stock CPU cooler and read that the Noctua NH-U12S would fit. With other CPU coolers, I would have had to remove one of the DIMMs. No way was I going to do that. I installed the Noctua and it fits beautifully. The Noctua fan is very quiet. I thought I would have to resort to using a water cooler, but decided I'd go with this Noctua model after reading the reviews.

 

After installing the Noctua, I reset my BIOS and played around with the fan speeds. No need. Default settings keep the whole system cool while remaining quiet.

 

The CPU is an intel i5-3570K. I can easily overclock it, but just haven't had the desire... yet.

 

Power supplies in my builds have always been Seasonic. These have been reliable and quiet and supply plenty of power for the EVGA GTX770.

 

Tom

 

PS - "640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates

 

 

 

 

 

[Theo Verelst]

Not primarily because things might physically break or disks corrupted (though that is all possible), but because of the general properties of the "modern" processors, you may want to watch out when overclocking systems which aren't clearly allowing it.

 

I didn't check the I7 notebook I use, but in case of the server system (1st gen I7), when I first had built it together years ago, I tested it with all kinds of processing, being topped in rigor of loading the processor by certain NVidia graphics demos, using both full power of the processor, lots of memory, full capacity of the point-to-point link connecting the I7 with PCIExpress to the graphics card, and all the cuda processors and the projection graphics pipeline processors on the graphics card.

 

Using the default mobo settings, this always works, and unless the programs do strange things, never a crash, never a (Linux equivalent of) blue screen, never even errors, besides (usually obvious) bug. I mean this machine is so reliable with its 3 banks of memory and recent Fedora 64 bits I don't even log out of the X server FOR MONTHS ON A ROW, while the machine serves easily 50,000 web server hits per month, is the go-to many tab and many flash windows web brower for 2 people (needless to say I'm not a pitiful internet user), is recording and displaying well-filtered (cable) TV for hours a day, regularly play, High Definition satellite channels, acts as heavy load media server for other machines, is used for gimping fotos, processing 1080/50p video, every other day runs heavy audio applications, and NEVER crashes or seriously fails, I mean not even once per year.

 

Yet, when I tried very reasonable and decent overclocking, like using the 1666-7/7/7/20 memory at 1333 MHz instead the 1000 it defaults to, even thought the specs of the processor allow it: it will fail under heavy load at some point. Same with the clock speed, 3.2 + the factora turbo for a few threads is completely cool, I easily program it to transcode video *all night* and inform ffmpeg to use all 8 threads, and well, it hasn't "crashed" or shown serious error in many years, but add 10 percent to the clock (cooling can handle easily, supply is high quality and completely overspec-ed) and it WILL FAIL under certain circumstances.

 

Weird, but very tested true. Of course the newer (second gen) 12 threads/6 core Extreme Edition I7, which say "unleashed and unlocked" on the (ahem, rather expensive) little box, thus far also is completely serious error (say blue screen or serious software crashes) free (a tad less on windows, but hey, who is to blame for that, huh ?) while it runs many hours a day for about half a year or so, COMPLETELY OVERCLOCKED in every way, with all 4 memory banks almost twice the normal speed (2100 MHZ) 4.5 GHz instead of 3.2 (standard), more voltage current going to the processor and memory, and drawing serious power for at least hours on a row. So two completely different pictures!

 

T

[Mike Martin]

As of last night I had about 90% of my software installed. All is working very well. I even managed to get my 32-bit TC Powercore plug-ins running on Cubase 7-64. I'm still rather stunned by the speed of this thing. I haven't done any latency benchmarks to see how low / fast it will go. So far everything has been at 128 samples which seems quick enough for me. Tonight I'll cross my fingers and load up some project files and hope that they're all still intact.

[Joe Muscara]

[A bit OT - my new iPad Air arrived yesterday. I had been using an iPad 1 since a few months after they came out. That had become an exercise in frustration and I found myself using it less and less. The iPad Air has been the opposite experience, where I'm looking for reasons to use the silly thing. I've also reinstalled some apps and games I had deleted because they crashed regularly on the old one, and so far, everything has been much better on this one.

 

The funny thing is, my 2009 MacBook Pro running Mavericks has seemed faster since getting the iPad Air. Maybe Apple puts some drugs in the packaging for their new products that makes you think they're faster.]

[ITGITC]

The funny thing is, my 2009 MacBook Pro running Mavericks has seemed faster since getting the iPad Air. Maybe Apple puts some drugs in the packaging for their new products that makes you think they're faster.]

 

Sweetwater used to pack candy with their shipments. I always wondered what they were up to.

 

And then there are those rumours about the Apple Kool-Aid and their "Reality Distortion Field".

 

I think you should read this, Joe: KLONK!

 

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/4.-Angelic-halo-Steve-Jobs-iPhone-Top-5-holy-godly-Apple-CEO-Steve-Jobs-illustrations-photoshopped-300x227.jpg

 

 

[Theo Verelst]

This here forum is no EE forum, I am aware of this fact, but I sincerely hope the fast computers that I at times apply nearly to the max of their umsubbtle abilities (at 60 degrees C for hours on a row), to let me explore nice sonic spaces are going upward instead of downward into geekiness. Unless asked, I shall not presume similar interest much further.

 

t

[RABid]

I bought 4 SSD's two years ago, read a lot about how to set them up so that don't burn out too fast. Even with that two of them are already doorstops. I'm hoping they are better now.

[JeffLearman]

Don't worry. Just give those goddam programmers a year or two, and they'll write fat/lazy code that will drag your rocket ship back to tricycle speeds.

 

Damn those guys!

[RABid]

I'm still waiting for NI Komplete and Soundsonline Complete Composer's Collection to be offered on SSD.

[zephonic]

And then there are those rumours about the Apple Kool-Aid and their "Reality Distortion Field".

 

I think you should read this, Joe: KLONK!

 

Haha, the conclusion of that article:

Maybe the RDF isnt around Apple any more, though. Maybe the Reality Distortion Field has moved so that its now around us, around those who stubbornly refuse to admit how awesome Apple actually is.

 

For those of us familiar with the blogosphere's liberal use of RDF regarding all things Apple, this is a nice about-face.

 

[Joe Muscara]

My perspective on that article is this. I got to the point where I disliked the iPad 1. It wasn't any fun, and I wasn't sure about spending the money on the new one. Last Friday, I turned it in at Target where they were giving $200 (store credit, but still) for these old models. I thought I could order the iPad Air and have it in a few days. Instead, it was a 5 - 7 day backorder from Apple. I seriously considered not buying one right now after all.

 

Then I talked to my guy at Sweetwater on Monday and they had the model I wanted in stock. Yes, it came with candy but I haven't opened it.

 

Maybe I'd like some things about competitive products better. Maybe the iPad Air isn't the best, but it's really good. And, it works with all the stuff I had been doing on my old iPad, just better.

 

I know you're just giving me a hard time, Tom.

 

Sorry for the continued OT, Mike.